Coffee breaks gave valuable time for exchange and to visit also the vendor exhibition. Credit: HZB

More than 600 scientists registered this year for the 9th annual BER II and BESSY II User Meeting from Wednesday to Friday, 13-15 December 2017. The Friends of Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin recognised outstanding work in the field of synchrotron radiation with an Innovation Award, and the best doctoral dissertation with the Ernst-Eckard-Koch prize.

Research with synchrotron radiation was the focus on Wednesday. On Thursday, the „Science Day“, a broad overview on user research was given. The public talk entitled “Interfacing with the brain using organic electronics” found great appeal with the audience: George Malliaras from the University of Cambridge spoke about the potential of organic electronics as brain implants for treating neurological diseases such as epilepsy. New materials and their characterisation at synchrotron sources will play a crucial role in this development. A vendor exhibition by 56 companies on new technical and optical instruments for research was well visited by the scientists.

Highly motivated were all the young scientists who could present their research in Young Scientist Sessions at Wednesday (synchrotron radiation) and Friday (neutron research).

The Neutron Day on Friday offered talks covering new methods and results using neutrons. The satellite workshop entitled “Diffraction Data Processing using DIALS – a practical workshop” took place in parallel.

Poster prizes of HZB Usermeeting

Thursday evening, in the experimental hall at BESSY II, nearly 200 posters from users and HZB scientists were presented. A jury had the difficult task to select the best poster. The poster prize of this HZB usermeeting was given to Katrein Sauer for her Poster on „Fish (Pike) have evolutionary advanced damage resistant bones with layered lamellae different from mammal bones“.

A special poster award in the field of protein crystallography was given by Manfred Weiss and his team to Julia Kratky, University of Leipzig. Her Poster with the title "Structural studies on the substrate and cofactor binding mode of FAD-dependent monooxygenases” presented a new synthesis for the blue dye indigo.

Friends of Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin: Prize ceremony

The Friends of Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin bestowed the Innovation Award upon a team of physicists from DESY, Hamburg: Dr. Bart Faatz, Dr. Evgeny Schneidmiller, Dr. Siegfried Schreiber, Dr. Markus Tischer and Dr. Mikhail Yurkov have been awarded for their work on „Innovative applications of gap-tunable undulators with integrated phase shifters in SASE x-ray FELs“.

The Ernst-Eckard-Koch prize, likewise awarded by the Friends of HZB, went this year to Dr. Nele Thielemann-Kühn her doctoral dissertation (at Uni Potsdam and HZB) on „Optically induced ferro- and antiferromagnetic dynamics in the rare-earth metal dysprosium“.